IDIA Lab has designed a virtual simulation of the villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site located outside of Rome in Tivoli, Italy. This project is being produced in collaboration with the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory (VWHL) at the University of Virginia (UVA), directed by Dr. Bernard Frischer and…
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Deep Mapping Middletown is a platform for intensive, spatially-driven investigations of Muncie, Indiana, that employ techniques derived from literary study, history, anthropology, geography and art. Its ultimate aim is to produce a “detailed multimedia depiction of a place” that capitalizes on the extensive archive created by the century of social research focused on Muncie as…
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Mapping Middletown Voices is an initiative focused on spatializing data from oral histories that document historical experience in Muncie, Indiana. Researchers completed most of these interviews in connection with research on Muncie as Middletown, the subject of Robert and Helen Lynd’s pathbreaking investigation of American community life and its many successors. It employs geographic text analysis…
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Associate Professor of Geography Jorn Seemann is spearheading a mapping and storytelling project focused on Muncie’s Whitely neighborhood. Entitled MASTS (Mapping and Storytelling System) of Whitely, the project creates a community-centered, open-ended online platform that gathers and shares place-based histories of the neighborhood, historical sources and documents, and personal spatial biographies. Students enrolled in Seemann’s…
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The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown is the creation of students enrolled in History 424 (Fall 2022). It examines changes in the kinds of work and work experiences of local residents, including industrial workers, women, and racial and ethnic minorities. It is built on the Scalar platform, an open-source, media-rich platform that facilitates the non-linear…
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On August 15 and 16, 2022, the DSL organized a hybrid (remote/in-person) gathering of scholars, librarians, and designers to explore possibilities for the Deep Mapping Middletown (DMM) project. Drawing upon a selection of archival materials and background data, each participant proposed a plan for the project and considered the challenges such an undertaking will face. Short…
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On November 1, 2023, Jim Connolly and John Fillwak presented “Deep Mapping Middletown: Representing Ethnographic Data Spatially” to the ACM Sigspatial International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities in Seattle Washington. They discussed the challenges and opportunities involved in the incorporation of ethnographic descriptions into 3D simulations.
What Middletown Read is a database and search engine built upon the circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 5, 1891 to May 27, 1893 and from November 5, 1894 to December 3, 1902. It documents every book that every library patron borrowed during those periods. The Center for Middletown Studies, University…
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Digital artists from Ball State’s IDIA Lab built their virtual simulation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West with the Unity 3-D gaming platform along with custom software created by the lab. Cowboys and Indians captivated the country when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West rolled through America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. More than a century…
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Learn how modern technology can shape our understanding of the past during a special program at Mounds State Park on Saturday, Nov. 14. Visitors to the 1 p.m. program will join park naturalist Kelley Morgan to learn about modern technologies that help archaeologists and historians bring the past to life. During the second half, director…
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